[Les travailleurs peu qualifiés vont-ils devenir de simples prolongements d’une machine ? Deux chercheurs y répondent à travers une analyse du taylorisme appliqué aux entrepôts logistiques : Jérôme Gautié professeur à l’université Paris-I-Panthéon-Sorbonne, chercheur au Centre d’économie de la Sorbonne (CES) et chercheur associé au Cepremap, dont les recherches portent sur les transformations du travail et de l’emploi, et Coralie Perez économiste, ingénieure de recherche à l’université Paris-I, membre du Centre d’économie de la Sorbonne (CES), dont les recherches portent notamment sur les effets des changements technologiques et organisationnels sur les conditions de travail et d’emploi.]
Workers have not disappeared, even if, with the erosion of traditional worker bastions, they tend to disappear from collective representations. Their invisibility results in part from the fact that a large number carry out tertiary type activities, particularly in logistics, which has experienced strong development in recent decades (Carlotta Benvegnù and David Gaborieau, “Logistical worlds. From the global analysis of flows to the situated analysis of work and employment practices », 2020).
In 2019, the sum of “skilled handling, warehousing and transport workers”of the “unqualified handlers” and “sorting, packaging, shipping workers, unskilled” was around 780,000, or 14.6% of all workers as defined by INSEE. If we add the “delivery drivers and couriers” And “truck drivers”, there were, in the same year, 400,000 additional employees (i.e. still 7.4% of workers). We are particularly interested here in retail logistics workers in large distribution chains (excluding drivers), based on research carried out in France and Germany (Jérôme Gautié, Karen Jaehrling, Coralie Perez, “Neo-Taylorism in the Digital Age: Workplace Transformations in French and German Retail Warehouses”, 2020).
The logistics sector is particularly interesting to study, because it has been strongly marked by the development of digital technologies. But what was the impact on mostly low-skilled employment? We can, following Hartmut Hirsch-Kreinsen (“Digitalization and Low-skilled Work”, 2016) distinguish four scenarios. The first scenario is simply that of “non-impact” – if digital innovations are not introduced, it is in particular because they are not profitable. The second, in contrast, is that of complete automation – for example the replacement of low-skilled jobs with a machine or algorithm. The third is that of maintaining (at least partially) these jobs, but which would be accompanied by their increase in skills – the new production processes requiring greater qualifications. The fourth is that of “digitalization of work”where the low-skilled worker is not completely replaced by the machine, but is subject to it, and becomes, in certain cases, only a simple extension of it – within the framework of what we can call a “digital Taylorism” (“ digital taylorism »). The logistics sector offers a good illustration of this last scenario.
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